Keeping Our Feet Dry - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 200

tion; and tributary-basin improvements, which include the building of dams, reservoirs,
pumps, and channels for drainage and flood control. It is a massive system: the “main
stem” levees, flood-walls, and various control structures stretch 2,203 miles (some 1,606
miles along the river itself, and another 596 miles along the Arkansas and Red Rivers in
the Atchafalaya Basin).
But Bea also believes that even more basic changes to the way America handles
floods are required. While America has plenty of technology to control rising water in
an environmentally sound way, the government has yet to use it wisely or broadly. We
need new state and national organizations to address the infrastructure challenge. And
we need to engage all concerned—commerce, government, and the public—to help the
process. “We need a long-term vision for how to deal with water, which we've never
had,” he said. “We need much better leadership, from the bottom of the local level to the
top of the federal level.”
The United States will face more, and more intense, flooding this century. How should
we react?
The nation can take some basic steps to control high water, eliminate dangerous
levees, and curtail building in flood zones. First, Congress must rethink land- and
water-use policy and connect them more closely. Second, the Army Corps of Engineers
should be reinvigorated and given a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust,
nationwide flood-protection system, as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures
that have tragically failed regularly. As part of this reinvention, the Corps must be held
accountable. This means repealing the laws stemming from the 1928 Flood Control Act
that immunize the Corps from prosecution when its levees fail. Third, citizens and busi-
nesses that benefit from levees, which is most of the nation, should apply their resources
to their construction and upkeep and work hand in hand with the Corps. Fourth, by
integrating nature and technology, building only in areas that can adequately be pro-
tected, and allowing some wetlands to return to their naturally absorbent and uncon-
strained state, bioengineered flood defense will provide effective protection.
Most fundamentally, the nation needs to rethink how it accommodates the environ-
ment. For years, Americans have relied on “hard” engineering—dredging, bulldozing,
and building ever-taller walls—to control floods. But water is an irresistible force, and
these efforts are eventually doomed to fail. Instead of trying to beat nature into submis-
sion with hard engineering, the Corps should develop a greener and more intelligent
system of flood defenses that integrates traditional engineering with natural storm de-
fenses, such as barrier islands, wetlands, and reeds. Such a “soft” approach to flood con-
trol is costly to build and maintain at first, but over the long term, it is more effective
and cheaper than the hard engineering approach.